Innovators are from different professions, ages, background and states managed to break the barriers especially that restrict engineers and doctors from working together.Snehlata Shrivastav | TNN | September 24, 2016, 13:15 IST

Nagpur: The five-day medical conclave at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) not just resulted in 60 engineers and doctors developing prototypes of 20 different medical devices but also set the ball rolling for further such conclaves and networking projects that will lead to many more devices being developed.

Since these innovators are from different professions, ages, background and states they also managed to break the barriers especially that restrict engineers and doctors from working together. Chair of conclave and professor in-charge of Biomedical Engineering and Technology (incubation) Centre (BETIC) from IIT Bombay Prof B Ravi told TOI the workshop was also successful as it was well-planned activity and had three major components to it-- develop, deliver, and deploy-- that were to be followed by each participant.

“Everyone worked 24x7 to give the best to the team’s product. They hardly slept in the night. They were not actually competing with each other but helping each other solve problems when someone got stuck. Each team had a mechanical and an electronics engineer and a doctor. It was a completely nontraditional way of learning,” said Rupesh Ghyar, CEO of the BETIC. It is a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration project involving IIT Bombay, VNIT and College of Engineering (COE) Pune and several hospitals.

VNIT director Narendra Chaudhari, professor in charge of BETIC at VNIT Prof A M Kuthe, Prof B Ravi, director of college of engineering Pune B Ahuja and V P Bapat, very senior engineer, researcher and mentor appreciated the efforts of the participants, their sincerity, dedication and overall the desire to excel and complete the work in prescribed five days. “Of course there were mentors too. The mentors already are trained in holding such workshops and hence they could motivate the researchers easily,” said Prof Ravi.

According to the 21-member jury, though every product was good, five held a lot of promise of being converted into products that would make things easier for the doctors and paramedical staff. These include a small external device that can detect the onset as well as the stage of breast cancer. The device indicates the results in three different colours and can be used by even ASHA workers for screening rural women for breast cancer.

Another device has a mechanism for regulating drug delivery. One device can measure the haemoglobin in a person’s blood in a non-invasive way. Two other devices that have promise for further improvement are a jaw exercise device and a long volume measurement device.

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